Shen Wei Dance Arts in its unusual production of "The Rite of Spring" one of two works the acclaimed New York company performs in its Houston debut May 18, presented by Society for the Performing Arts.

Photo: Christie Passagno

Shen Wei Dance Arts in its unusual production of "The Rite of...

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Shen Wei Dance Arts in "Folding," one of two works the acclaimed New York company performs in its Houston debut May 18, presented by Society for the Performing Arts.

Photo: Christoper Duggan, Phootographer

Shen Wei Dance Arts in "Folding," one of two works the acclaimed...

Image 3 of 3

Shen Wei Dance Arts will perform "Folding" Saturday at the Wortham Theater Center. The program is set to traditional Tibetan Buddist chants.

You might think you've never heard of Chinese choreographer Shen Wei. If you watched the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, however, you saw his most epic dance. Aside from its stunning pageantry for 16,000 performers, the piece was a good example of Shen's penchant for blending movement and calligraphy. Watched by millions on television, it's possible the event also was a world record. Has any other living choreographer been seen in a single instance by as many people?

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The company plans to offer two of its most critically acclaimed works: Shen's popular 2002 "Folding" (set to traditional Tibetan Buddhist chants and music by John Tavener) as well as his austere 2003 reinterpretation of Igor Stravinsky's classic "The Rite of Spring."

Well trained in traditional interdisciplinary Chinese opera during his youth, Shen also is an accomplished visual artist, which sets him apart from his peers. While his work is based in the body, it is non-narrative and often embodies further abstraction through painting, sculpture, video and other theatrical elements. Much of it has been site-specific and inspired by locations such as the Park Avenue Armory or the Guggenheim Museum's rotunda.

Critics like to label Shen's dances as "organic" and "holistic" because of their striking naturalism. His methodology is both experimental and traditional. In the early days of American modern dance, choreographers such as Martha Graham, José Limón and Merce Cunningham developed their own idiosyncratic techniques. While the practice faded by the 1980s, Shen is unique in having continued this legacy into the 21st century with a movement system he calls "Natural Body Development Technique."

On his website, he explains that his dancers, "through the detailed investigation of moving ideas," explore aspects of "breath, internal energy, center shifting, momentum, spirals, rotations and flow." Another area of his movement research is preoccupied with nerve initiations.

In 2002, when Shen was working on his new "Rite of Spring" at the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C., dance critic Anna Kisselgoff described his monochromatic stage design as "smudged with white, a backgammonlike board with traces of triangles." I like to think of it more like a Chinese checkerboard painted in whitewash on a black clay tennis court. As it proceeds, the trajectory of each dancer is traced in chalky material on the floor. Desolate and mesmerizing, the choreographic structure contains improvised sections. By the finale, everything comes together to create a harrowing and highly expressive statement.

Shen has abandoned Nijinsky's original scenario for the ballet. "In keeping with my interest in abstraction," he wrote on his website, "it is only the melodic and rhythmic qualities of the music, rather than the story it tells, which inform the choice of movement vocabulary."